Is fake news becoming a real thing?

“New developments in video and audio manipulation tools allow for the creation of footage with false speech, that appears so realistic you can hardly tell the difference. So, what does this mean for the future of fake news?” It means the fake news campaign just got a lot harder to fight. A video posted by the Guardian today (found here) showed the University of Washington’s Synthesizing Obama project in which they have given the term lip-syncing a new meaning. All were fake, but very realistic, I would add. With recent technological advances, it’s not possible to fake audio and video simulations to the users’ liking.

“We already see it doesn’t even take doctored audio or video to make people believe something that isn’t true,” Mandy Jenkins, from social news company Storyful. “This has the potential to make it worse,” the Guardian article says. We’re now entering an era in which trustworthiness are credibility are becoming more and more like lost concepts, not inherently lost but certainly harder and harder to find. Or maybe living with all of the Trump nonsense has just made me bitter. Or am I the only one tired of hearing the phrase ‘fake news?’

I want to stand by my position in saying there’s no such thing as fake news that I touched on in my previous article a couple weeks ago. It is either fake or it is news. But how the hell are we going to be able to discern the truth from the fallacies with recent technological advances? Well if it weren’t a real thing before, it certainly will be in the future. Honestly, I’m not in any way prepared for that headache.